Sushi.com: Could Be a Good Restaurant Name…if You Owned the Sushi.com Domain Name

January 20, 2012

There’s a certain art to creating a good restaurant name. You might want to go for a cheeky pun, like A Salt and Battery or the Soy Luck Club. Maybe you want to name it after the chef, taking the route of Daniel or David Burke Kitchen. Location is another way — just look at Eleven Madison Park or 10 Downing. Really, the possibilities are endless for naming a new restaurant, which is why it’s so perplexing that the name of a casual, new Upper East Side Japanese restaurant is Sushi.com (1570 Second Avenue, 212-650-0299). Now, it would be quite a clever name if they actually owned the domain sushi.com, but, nope, they don’t.

The website for Sushi.com is actually 1570sushi.com, referring back to their address. The real sushi.com, meanwhile, is mostly an online shop where you can purchase sushi-related items like bamboo mats and sushi cookbooks. There’s also a header that notes, “To inquire about advertising on sushi.com or to inquire about this domain name, you may send an email to: todd@sushi.com,” implying that it’s basically a moneymaker for people who go to sushi.com thinking it’s their favorite sushi spot.

Which goes back to the question, why not just name yourself 1750sushi.com? You’ll then at least be able to drive traffic back to your own website and not someone else’s. And honestly, 1570sushi.com isn’t all that much worse of a name than Sushi.com.

What makes this whole naming situation even funnier is that there are multiple, unrelated restaurants called Sushi.com. One’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and its domain name is a2sushi.com, and there’s another in Spokane, Washington, that uses the domain mainsushi.com. And in Dublin, Ohio, there’s a Sushi.com, although it was wise enough to snag the domain sushidotcom.com. Truth.com.